Six years ago, I wrote a Thanksgiving post on this blog that was exactly two sentences long. It called 2020 a "difficult, challenging but eye-opening" year and said that if you stepped back, you'd find plenty to be thankful for. I stand by every word. But two sentences don't help much when you've got a house full of relatives and a turkey that's still frozen on Wednesday night. My boys are grown now, or close to it, so I've had a lot of Novembers to see which family Thanksgiv

Some links in this post are Amazon affiliate links. If you buy through one, I earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. I only recommend gear I would tell a friend to buy. The best camera for family photos is the one you will actually carry out the door. That is the whole thing. It took me two years and one expensive mistake to work that out. I am not a photographer. I am a dad with a full week and kids who do not hold still for anything. What I wanted was something th

I took thousands of photos when my boys were little. Today, I can’t find the one picture I want. It becomes an adventure to find that one photo. I find all the other photos but rarely find the one I started looking for in the first place. If I do find the photo, it’s in the last place I look. When younger dads ask me how to capture family memories, I don't start with cameras or scrapbooks. I begin with a system small enough that a tired dad will still be doing it six months

I once asked my son to put his shoes on six times. Six. By the fifth I wasn't asking anymore, I was doing that low growl thing dads do when we've run out of road. Then I yelled. He cried. We were late anyway. If you're searching how to get kids to listen, you know that exact feeling. You're not a bad dad. You've fallen into a rhythm that quietly teaches your kids the first ask doesn't count. Most advice on kids not listening starts with the child. This one starts with you, be

The short answer on how to handle toddler tantrums without yelling: calm your own body first, get down low, say almost nothing, and hold the boundary you already set. That's it. Everything below is just detail on those four moves. I learned it the hard way. My youngest went down in the cereal aisle because I said no to the box with the cartoon tiger on it. Full starfish. Screaming like I'd taken a limb. And I did the thing I'm not proud of. I got loud, grabbed his arm and tr

Most of what I know about being a dad did not come from a book. It came from getting it wrong on a Tuesday morning with one kid missing a shoe and the other one negotiating over toast. The dad hacks below are the ones that survived that. Not clever ideas I read somewhere and never used. Actual fixes I still reach for. Some of them will look too simple. That is the point. On a hard day you do not need a parenting philosophy. You need something you can do in ten seconds while h